Indigo Springs

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Fabulous,” Sahara groaned. “Can you absorb it?”

  Astrid reached for the fluid, then quailed. “Fighting…can’t…”

  “We aren’t fighting.” Sahara took her by the shoulders. “Astrid, if you leave the vitagua here, people will get contaminated, right?”

  No fight, no breakup. Even so: “You want to get away with as much magic as I can carry.”

  There was a crash upstairs. Mark flinched.

  “Go on.” Sahara brushed a curl off her smoke-streaked forehead. “You know you can’t say no.”

  Stretching out her hands, Astrid drew in the vitagua. The grumbles became a riot of shouts. She kept on, drinking it in until liquid magic lay under her skin, within the folds of her brain, behind her toenails. Voices slashed at her and she screamed, flailing.

  “I maxed out, Will,” she wailed. “No more, don’t make me.”

  “It’s okay,” Sahara said. “Nobody’s forcing you.”

  “Liar.” She tried to focus on the future, the next few minutes. The cacophony chattered about everything, too many things.

  “No more,” she moaned, covering her ears.

  Sahara crawled to the freezer, thrusting her hands into the fluid.

  “What are you doing?” Mrs. Skye demanded.

  “Helping.” Sahara’s eyes darkened, and the patterns in her hair clarified. Her arms began to tuft, the hairs on her wrists fluffing into pinfeathers.

  “Owwww,” Sahara said happily.

  No. Astrid froze the last of the vitagua solid, so it was too cold to flow through skin. She ended up holding an icicle the size of a baseball bat.

  “Jesus, Astrid, I’m trying to help.”

  “Now’s when I recognize the pattern,” Astrid said. “It’s turning you into a starling.”

  Throwing back her head, Sahara buzzed with birdy laughter. “It’s for the best. I feel great.”

  Don’t fight. “You’re changing. This is the part where I remind you—”

  “I don’t care about some curse! Patterflam’s dead, the Chief’s dead. Astrid, this is magic. We’ll fix the ozone layer, reforest the Amazon. Jacks would have wanted—”

  “Leave Jacks out of this.” Icy tears froze her eyelashes. She heard Jacks’s voice among the grumbles, imagined him behind her, ready to catch her if she lost her balance. But he wasn’t; if she fell, she’d end up on her butt. She moved without premeditation, tucking the paintbrush into her hair, wishing him back, wishing for help. Her fingernails changed to brushtips.

  Images bloomed on the walls—Sahara, at the lip of a volcano. Half animal and half woman, she had mad eyes, starling wings, and red-tipped talons.

  “This is what you become,” Astrid said. The house creaked. Plaster rained down from above.

  “Astrid,” Sahara said soothingly. “I know this is my fault. I should have been more discreet. But if we get out of here with enough magic to protect ourselves, I’ll make it all up to you.”

  “How could anything make up—?”

  “It’s just the two of us now.” She stroked Astrid’s cheek. “I know what you need, what you’ve always—”

  “I need Daddy,” she said. “I need Ma and Jacks.”

  “You need me.” Sahara leaned close. “The important thing is us.”

  No fight, no breakup. Astrid trembled. “You, me, and the spirit water?”

  “Darling, you’ve wanted me since grade school.”

  Since forever. “You’re saying—you’ll love me, right, if I need you to?”

  “Oh, my euphemistic darling. I’ll fuck you brainless.” Sahara kissed her on the mouth with chilly, beak-hard lips. Their tongues met for an instant.

  She pulled back with a gleeful inhuman wink.

  Astrid straightened, stunned, sucking wind. Crashes sounded above them in the attic—termites were reducing the beams of the roof to powder.

  Satisfied, Sahara put on Siren. “Mark?”

  “No!” Mrs. Skye bellowed. “You said you wouldn’t do this again!”

  “Gotta hide this last bit of magic, Pat. Mark, come here.”

  Face slack, Mark marched forward. Mrs. Skye couldn’t hold him. She looked at Astrid, pleading.

  “And here’s where it finally comes apart,” Astrid said. She snatched the mermaid from Sahara’s chest, snapping its chain with one jerk of her work-muscled arm.

  “Run!” Astrid screamed, and Mark stumbled backwards.

  Sahara gaped at Astrid, eyes brimming. She tore a fistful of hair—hair mixed with feathers—out of her scalp. A furious, buzzing snnk-snnk hummed in her throat.

  “Sahara, I’m sorry, but—”

  “Don’t. You don’t want me, that’s your choice.”

  “Because you couldn’t buy me off with sex? Sahara—”

  “Give me the mermaid.” Sahara grabbed, and Astrid pushed her away with the frozen club of vitagua.

  “Sahara, stop it.”

  “Give me Siren!”

  “I can’t.”

  With a shriek Sahara pounced on the icicle instead, wresting it out of Astrid’s hand. She smashed it into the banister, breaking off a sharp edge, and then drove the point into Mrs. Skye’s chest. The old woman collapsed, and Sahara kept pushing.

  “The mermaid, Astrid, now.”

  “Now’s when I finally tell you no.” Cold tears ran down her face as Astrid melted the icicle embedded in Mrs. Skye’s chest. Blood and vitagua poured down the old lady’s blouse. For a dreadful moment, Astrid thought she had a third death on her hands.

  No, she thought, she’s breathing….

  Sahara pounced on the magic saltshaker. “She doesn’t have to die, Astrid.”

  Grumbles jabbered, making her head ache. “Is this where I take that from you?”

  “It will heal her, right?” Sahara held it up. “Trade it for the mermaid.”

  “No, Sahara,” Astrid repeated. It was just as hard the second time.

  “Maybe you think she might as well die. She is cursed, after all.”

  “Nobody else dies.” Astrid pulled on the vitagua in Sahara’s wrist, upending the shaker over Mrs. Skye. Bright healing stars drifted downward from the chantment. The ugly blue wound in the old lady’s chest closed itself.

  Sahara hurled the saltshaker away. It fell against a smoldering pile of wood stakes and melted, filling the air with the smell of burnt lilacs.

  I could hold you, Astrid thought, and what hurt the most was she suddenly didn’t want to. She released the vitagua. Sahara rubbed her hand.

  “Go,” Astrid told her.

  Mrs. Skye groaned, folding over onto herself.

  “Another contaminated victim,” Sahara huffed, stepping onto the magic carpet. “You saved her life? So what?”

  “I save her?” Astrid asked. “Has that happened yet?”

  Smirking, Sahara stamped on the carpet. It rose, lifting her up the stairs. She maneuvered it through a widening gap in the roof and was gone.

  She didn’t say good-bye.

  “Cursed,” Mrs. Skye rasped as Astrid watched Sahara fly away. Her face was growing whiskers, a snout. A black bear? “I’m cursed.”

  “No,” Astrid whispered. “I fixed you. If I could…Jacks? Did I do something? Did I save her?”

  Smudged paint ran over the freezer. Staring at the images, Astrid reached out to the spirit water on the floor as Mrs. Skye continued to change, her canines getting longer, her hands becoming paws.

  She traced the vitagua around Mrs. Skye’s bracelets.

  “Astrid?”

  “You’ll be okay,” she said, concentrating. It was like chanting anything—instead of binding magic into an object, though, she was sliding the chantments into the woman’s flesh, joining them.

  Mrs. Skye seemed to grow, her limbs stretching waxily. Then she melted. Suddenly her face was Chinese, delicate and young, with wide, wise eyes.

  No whiskers, no fur. She appeared human.

  “Mrs. Skye?”

  The goddess gaped, touching her face. �
�What happened?”

  “I meant to do your bracelets,” Astrid said. “I forgot you had the lipstick.”

  Blinking, Patience became misty. She tumbled past the freezer, sliding through it as if it wasn’t there. She solidified, and her features changed again. “I can’t control it.”

  Astrid stared at the radiant woman beside her. “There was never a normal life, was there? Now was when I realized there was never any hope I’d be able to hide being the spring-tapper. I screwed up.”

  Patience tugged on her arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We ask you to leave us,” Astrid said. “But you don’t trust us to do the right thing, do you? You feel responsible.”

  “Kid, if you’re going to run…”

  “I don’t run for months.”

  “We can’t stay.”

  She had let Sahara go. Had wanted her to leave. Despair rose in her. “Let the house fall.”

  Patience grunted, sounding like a cranky old woman. “This is no time for suicide fantasies.”

  “Mark was gone. There wasn’t anybody left for you to protect, Patience.”

  “I’m not leaving you here to get crushed, kid.”

  Astrid sighed. “I could go into the unreal; freeze over.”

  “That would be avoiding the problem.”

  “It’s what I did all summer.”

  “Summer’s over.” Patience took her by the chin, holding her gaze as debris fell around them. “You think you lost everything? Think there’s nothing left?”

  “Jacks died. I let Sahara go.”

  “There’s always something else.”

  Rubbing her face, Astrid nodded. “Ma. I have to go with her.”

  “So let’s go,” Patience said. “There’s nothing else to do here, is there?”

  “No,” Astrid said. “You were right. Summer’s over.”

  They crept up the buckling basement steps, making their way across the living room floor. Its once-pink carpet was gray with mold. The shredding wallpaper stank of old glue and the fireplace was breaking into dust. Plaster dropped from above and Astrid heard sizzling inside the walls.

  “Bad wiring, bad plumbing.” She stubbed her toe on a hunk of molding. “Bad Astrid.”

  “Keep going.” Patience tugged her away from the stairwell. Was it yesterday that they’d moved in?

  “When did Ma attack Olive?”

  They reached the half-open front door, with its rotten, sagging frame. Patience pressed her against a wall.

  “We’re coming out!” she yelled. “Don’t shoot!”

  A nova of spotlights shone on the porch. Outside, soldiers were shouting. One of them—Roche probably—had a bullhorn. “Hold your fire, you morons, hold your fire!”

  “Then we went to jail for a while,” Astrid said. “Believe it or not, you’re going to like it there.”

  As they stepped out into the media glare, the house collapsed behind them.

  • Chapter Thirty-Three •

  “So you surrendered,” I say. Reaching the end of this tale has left me wanting a smoke, even though it has been fifteen years since I had a cigarette.

  “Yes.” Astrid’s brown eyes shine. “Patience and I…stepped back into the world.”

  “I saw it on TV.” The images are seared into my memory like third-degree burns. Mark staggering out first, his glasses glimmering and a rifle in his hands. He was already alchemized, so much a salamander man that his hair was falling out.

  Caroline and my daughter were watching too. My wife’s face burned with something I didn’t understand. Now I think it was greed, the same hunger for power captured in these portraits of Mark and Sahara.

  The cameras caught Sahara Knax as she flew through the broken roof on a flying carpet, zooming away from Mascer Lane and outpacing the helicopters in pursuit.

  Next came Patience. She drew the attention of every camera operator away from Sahara, from the spectacle of a woman in flight. Patience, who made Astrid seem merely ordinary as she too crept out onto the porch of the house, barefoot, clad in a bloodstained blue dress. Her head was bowed, her hands raised as though she were a criminal. As though she were to blame.

  Roche had rushed in, bellowing: “Who’s this? Where’s Patience Skye?”

  Astrid, caught at the edge of Patience’s close-up, said, “This was Mrs. Skye.”

  Watching, I suddenly knew the world was slipping beyond human understanding or control. I’d still believed, though, that we could change it back.

  Now, I’m not so sure.

  I shake off the memories and look at the fortune cards. Astrid hands over the deck and I thumb through. Here I see Patterflam, stabbed by poor, doomed Jacks; there I see blue bubbles welling from the crumbling fireplace. Tulips edge the picket fence in one springtime scene, the flowers foreground to the trio of housemates as they laugh together on the front porch. Flipping it over, I see policemen blockading Mascer Lane.

  I linger over an image of a water serpent—some kind of alchemized aquatic life. I’ve seen video of these too. Sahara claimed she had created them: my wife and countless others were suitably impressed.

  “Roche whisked us off to jail,” Astrid says. “He dug Lee’s body out of the ruins of the house and learned Mark had never shot him…that the Chief had never been shot.”

  “They tried to get answers out of Patience,” I remember. “But she wasn’t talking. Protecting you?”

  “She is kinder than I deserve,” Astrid says. “I was so overwhelmed by the vitagua, I could barely work out what was happening. I couldn’t get things straight—what happened when. I was so sad….”

  “Grieving over Jacks,” I say. “And Sahara’s betrayal must have been like a death too. The person you thought you knew was gone….”

  “In her place was a hole, something raw,” she murmurs.

  “Like having a tooth pulled without anesthetic. Bloody, painful, and there’s a gap—”

  “Exit wound.” She peers at me through windblown curls. “I didn’t know you knew that, Will.”

  It is a relief, I find, that she hasn’t seen into every corner of my soul.

  Wind snaps my shirtsleeves like sails, raising plumes in the gritty sand at my feet. I should prod Astrid—I still have questions—but I can’t bear the thought of digging at her. Earlier she said I’m not sentimental. Roche once claimed he hired me because I’m a heartless bastard. I want to prove—to anyone—that it isn’t true.

  “Unsentimental and heartless aren’t the same.” Astrid answers my unspoken thought. Turning over the next card, I see…myself.

  I am wearing the clothes I have on now, sipping tea and wearing an expression I’ve never seen in the mirror. My listening face, I suppose—but there is something in it, something wistful, affectionate. The portrait shows emotions I don’t remember feeling, but I glance up and see them again, doubled, reflected in Astrid’s pupils.

  It’s a shock, a view of myself I never wanted, and when I snap my eyes down they find the painted image again. I release the card into the wind, send it sailing over the white sand dunes.

  “What about Sahara and you?” I ask.

  “Ah, Sahara,” she says. “Without the mermaid, she’s had to seduce her followers with flashy stunts. Taking credit for creating the alchemized forests, bribing her favorite Primas with chantments. Luckily she knew where we’d sent all the things I made. But—”

  “But she needs more magical objects.”

  “Yes. Which is why she needs me.”

  “But you’re going to hide?” The sound of starlings shrieking and buzzing, behind us, is louder.

  “That wouldn’t be responsible, would it? I’ve learned my lesson, Will.” White grit swirls around the toes of Astrid’s shoes. “Do you like the unreal? I remember you saying so…soon? Have you said it already?”

  “Astrid…”

  “Would you want to stay?”

  Fear and desire pull me in two directions. “Roche’ll have my ass for letting you escape….”


  “Like you could’ve stopped me, tough guy.”

  “There’s my children.”

  “Don’t decide right away,” she says. “You have the ring, you’re safe. Think it over.”

  “Why should I?”

  She smiles. “Will, the world will be a better place after this flood has broken. Cleaner air, lower birthrate, less poverty. Your kids have a future—a good one.”

  The thought of retrieving my children from their kidnapper mother…“The unreal has day care, right?”

  “Um. Not exactly.”

  “Medical benefits?”

  “Ma knows first aid.” The dimple appears on her cheek.

  “Retirement package?”

  “When you get old I’ll give you the rocking chair my grandfather made. Set it up on a porch somewhere.”

  “This would be the rocker that Ev fell out of?”

  “Well, I’ll chant it. Or you can wear a helmet.”

  I’m grinning. Unbelievable. “What do you want with me, Astrid?”

  “For starters, I need an apprentice.” She returns my smile. “I know I’ve made it sound real appealing.”

  All I can manage in response is a nervous cough.

  “Think it over,” Astrid says. “It’s time we moved on to the pyrotechnics. Ready?”

  “No.”

  My belly lurches and suddenly we are back in the real.

  We are beside a small lake fringed by fir trees. The wind is gone and I place us immediately…I drive past this spot every morning on my way to work. We’re perhaps five miles from the secured compound.

  Starlings crowd together on every branch of every tree, on the ground around us, shrieking. The sound is so loud, my ears hurt.

  Sahara Knax is here.

  She steps out of the trees, expression haughty as she looks us over and dismisses me. Her iridescent wings are tinted with brown spots. Her coat drags on the ground.

  Mark Clumber follows, his salamander face helpless and afraid, his magic glasses clutched in one slimy hand.

  “So you came out,” Sahara says, addressing Astrid. “Afraid I’d break into the unreal?”

  “You’re not that powerful, Sahara.”

  “Right. You’re the anointed one. I’m just some thief wielding powers I can’t understand.”